Last update - 00:00 11/07/2007
Ex-president's accuser to court: Katsav phoned me 689 times
By Roni Singer-Heruti, Haaretz Correspondent
According to a response issued by President's Residence employee A., the first woman to accuse former president Moshe Katsav of rape almost a year ago, he called her 689 time from his office, car and home.
Two weeks ago, Katsav signed a plea agreement drafted by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, which stipulated that he resign from the presidency and confess to minor sex offenses, and in return the rape charges that appeared on the draft indictment would be dropped, and no jail time would be recommended. The testimony of A., who alleges the former president raped her and harassed her repeatedly, was excluded from the plea agreement.
A. submitted to the attorney general an 18-page response following his decision to exclude her testimony. In the response, A.'s attorney maintains that though Katsav claimed in his testimony that he had rarely called the complainant, the police obtained phone logs showing that this was not the case.
The response reads "the petition in question is significantly different from the other petitions pertaining to the plea bargain. In the petitions of the other complainants, the court was required to decide whether the punishment agreed upon in the plea bargain 'falls within the realm of the reasonable,' taking into account the nature of the crimes, the defendant's status, and the other details of the case. We request that the court revoke the decision to close the file on the complainant's case because it is highly unreasonable, or decide that that the conduct of Attorney General Menachem Mazuz was flawed to the extent that warrants revoking the decision."
The response also says that the decision to close the investigation over A.'s complaint does not stand on its own, as the attorney general claimed, but was defined as a condition within the context of the plea bargain signed by Katsav: "The Attorney General's attempts to 'whitewash' this condition and remove it from the context of the plea bargain in the retched manner in which it was, shows that also the attorney general felt that closing our case in the context of the plea bargain over the two other complaints, is wrong and, I would say, illegal, for it abandons one for the sake of the two others."